"Weird and bats**t" Steam launch of two different indie games with the same name ended in 3x more sales than expected: "It all absolutely popped off"

It sounds unfortunate – two, unrelated indie games with the exact same name launching on Steam at around the same time. But this case of bad luck might have actually been the boost developer Piece by Piece publisher No More Robots needed, according to founder Mike Rose.

Rose says in a new Bluesky thread digesting the Piece by Piece game launch that everything about it "was so weird and batshit." He means it affectionately, since strange serendipity is exactly why No More Robots "ended up with roughly x3 as many sales as we had hoped for, all due to a crazy naming coincidence."

When No More Robots' first launched developer Gamkat's cozy shop sim Piece by Piece on March 11, sales were exceedingly OK – "Not amazing, not bad, just very middle of the road," Rose says. But after No More Robots discovered developer Neon Polygons was releasing its own, unrelated game called Piece by Piece – a casual puzzle platformer – on March 13, "the silliness began."

Many publications, including one GamesRadar+, began to report on the coincidence and both studios' friendly decision to bunch their respective Piece by Piece games together in a discounted Steam bundle.

"50% of people who bought our game, bought it bundled with the other Piece by Piece," Rose reports. "But it wasn't just the bundle either – overall awareness of the game skyrocketed, and we now have tasty numbers of wishlists that we hope to convert to sales in the near future."

"It's hard to really have a takeaway from all of this, because we never planned for any of it to happen," Rose comments about the naming coincidence. Except, maybe he now knows "good things can happen when you try to be good people about tricky situations? Let's say that."

They may not also be called Piece by Piece, but there are a ton of other upcoming indie games this year.